I think I was one of the beginning ten thousand or so people into Bitcoins. I mined them and bought them so I could buy drugs on the deep web. Not too many 63 year olds were mining bitcoins and surfing the deep web on Tor, let alone younger people. I had to figure it all out or I would have been in deep shit having to rely on the scum on the street.

Mining became so expensive as the difficulty level, built in to the software, increased to the point where the electricity was more than the cost of a bitcoin. But who knew it would go to $1,000.00, then $2,000.00 and now in 2017 went over $5,000.00.

And has now dropped through a series of actions by the Chinese government plus deceiving words by Jamie Dimon of Goldman Sachs, where he says Bitcoin is a fraud and the next day buys a ton of the stuff. Just shows how the big banksters are deathly afraid of this system. Last Tuesday, Chinese news agencies reported that executives of crypto exchanges have been ordered to not leave the country, pending the government’s investigation of the exchanges there.

China is planning to ban Bitcoin nodes, isolating that country’s Bitcoin network from the rest of the world. If this happens, it will have the effect of raising the fees associated with Bitcoin, as miners scramble to set up operations in other parts of the world.

80% of all Bitcoin mining today takes place in China, with some miners taking advantage of the state-subsidized, ultra-cheap electricity available in certain regions. Electricity is the biggest expense in the manufacture of Bitcoin.

Contrary to the uninformed perception of many, Bitcoin is expensive to produce. Joby Weeks, of BitClub Network, which currently finds 3.2% of new Bitcoin blocks says that today, each Bitcoin costs $800 to mine from his facility in Iceland.